...All those tales about things that people sensed before they actually
happened. Tales that had been handed down and down and down until, if you tried to trace
them back, you'd end up God knows whereprobably Africa. And Granny had them all at
the tip of her tongue.
- Ann Petry

Belief in psychic events such as precognitive dreams runs quite high in the general
population of the U.S.between 25% and 50% in most surveys. But among blacks here,
the rate of belief is still higher. Belief in predictive dreaming was affirmed by 92% of
the 116 African-Americans I interviewed (as well as by 84% of 25 black male prisoners who
responded to questionnaires), but by a much lower 57% of a matching white sample of 80.
Thus in my samples all but a small percentage of blacks believe in predictive dreams,
while only something over half of whites do.

Above and beyond the yes-or-no question of belief, many more blacks than whites think
prediction is the thing about dreams. It tops the list of dream functions for blacks,
whereas for whites, it holds an uncertain position along with psychological insight,
problem-solving, and the proposition that dreams have no function at all.

Africa. North American slavery bulldozed virtually all specific customs from the
homelands. But there are enough similarities between African and African-American beliefs
and attitudes about dreams to suggest that African heritage still has an influence. These
similarities include the importance placed on ancestor visitation dreams, the fluidity of
boundaries between dreaming and other states of consciousness such as waking vision, and
the spirituality of dreams as expressed in religion and in other ways. As for dreams and
precognition (or divination), notice how similar these two statements are, one African,
one American:

Sometimes the ancestors deem certain information so important that they send it to the
subconscious mind without being consciously asked. Then we have prophetic dreams, rich in
symbolism and unforgettable!

The first is from The Usefulness of Dreams by West African Mary Chinkwita. The second
is from Jambalaya, a popular recipe book of African-American spirituality by Luisah Teish.
Teish may labor a little to sound African by playing up the ancestors, but she's genuinely
drawing on her African-American experience. Some of my interviewees also made the
connection between prophetic dreams and Africa. Maisha Hamilton-Bennett was Deputy
Commissioner of Health for Harold Washington in Chicago, and has taken over a dozen trips
to Africa to study indigenous healing. When I asked her why she thinks African-American
dream beliefs retain African features, she replied, "The most important thing is that
many African-Americans think that there's something in the dream that's going to tell you
what's going to happen."

Slavery days and folklore. The little we can know directly about dream beliefs in
slavery days comes from a few stories out of the lives of heroes of black history.
Frederick Douglass wrote about a dream foretelling the failure of his first attempt to
escape from slavery. A confederate in the plan, "Sandy, the root man," dreamed
some troubling dreams, one of which "somewhat damped" Douglass's spirits:

"I saw you, Frederick, in the claws of a huge bird, surrounded by a large number
of birds, of all colors and sizes. These were all picking at you, while you, with your
arms, seemed to be trying to protect your eyes...."

I confess I did not like this dream.... Sandy was unusually emphatic and oracular, and
his manner had much to do with the impression made upon me.

Harriet Tubman (who had dreams showing her the routes for the underground railroad)
accounted for her calmness when emancipation was proclaimed in 1863 by explaining that she
had already done her celebrating three years earlier. One morning in 1860, the unerring
conductress had arisen singing

..."My people are free! My people are free!" She came down to breakfast
singing the words in sort of ecstasy. She could not eat. The dream or vision filled her
whole soul, and physical needs were forgotten.

Stories like these suggest that prophetic dreaming was widely taken for granted by
African-Americans in slavery days.

Folklore is a bridge between those times and the present. Puckett in the 1920s
collected items about the causes for dreams coming true (such as sleeping under a new
quilt) and about means to prevent that (such as throwing salt into the fire). Hyatt in the
1930s found many individuals who "lay down to sleep and see different things before
they come to pass." Dorson's collections from Northern blacks in the 1950s also
contain predictive dreams, including a "Treasure Dream." These folkloric sources
all suggests widespread belief in precognitive dreaming.

The present day. Sculptor Preston Jackson was raised by parents from Tennessee in
Decatur, Illinois. His father was a Baptist minister:

If you started this conversation in my family, you wouldn't get out of here, because
they would have dreams. My brothers and sisters and parents believed in dreams.... It's a
prophecy. It's something you better follow up on, because it means something. And this is
the educated part of my family. All of us went to college. And they still talk the same
way about dreams.

Nearly every interview I conducted brought out evidence of this kind. People would say,
"I always think about dreams as something that's gonna happen in the future,"
and "As a child, I believed that my mother was shown, through dreams, things that
were gonna happen to people," and "I think everyone has dreams that are
prophetic." Gwen Robinson, a scholar of African-American culture, affirmed that
"dreams are regarded in the way of predicting the future." Barbara Pulliam, a
psychoanalyst with many black clients, likewise observed that predictive dreams "have
long been a vital part of black culture."

Even the ways some interviewees expressed their doubts testify to the prevalence of the
belief. Journalist and "concrete thinker" Richard Steele [88] said:

When discussion about dreams comes up in our culture, there are some people who view
that as a kind of harbinger of something that's gonna happen, or there's a premonition
somewhere in the dream. And I'm very much a skeptic about that.

Steele's very skepticism reflected his acquaintance with the prevailing theory. What's
more, a shadow of that theory fell over a memorable dream of his. He dreamed of being shot
in the stomach and then bleeding to death in an emergency room:

And as a matter of fact, I said to my wife, even though I'm not a great believer in
dreaming the thing that's gonna happen, I said, "You know, the thing was so strong, I
have this feeling that I'm gonna be somewhere and somebody's gonna shoot a gun, I'm gonna
get shot in the stomach and bleed to death."

Administrator Darryl Burrows' mother, a devout Methodist, is a different sort of
skeptic. Dreams, she thinks, might come from God and "probably do have some
predictive power," but they're so difficult to understand that we're "wrong,
often, in how we use them." Therefore, we should ignore them. Writer Daniel Wideman
(son of John Edgar Wideman) holds that African-Americans actually dream more about their
painful "collective history" than about the future. He acknowledges, however,
that people talk less about dreams from the past than about dreams reaching into the
futureas he himself believes dreams do.

Prediction and psychological insight. When hospital worker Diane Dugger told me about
the gruesome accidental death of her boyfriend from a pistol shot through the head, I
asked, "Did you dream about that?" I wondered if she'd gone through the sort of
nightmares which often follow major traumas. She assumed, however, that I wanted to know
about predictive dreams, and replied, "I didn't dream that anything like that would
happen." But Dugger did have an unrelated series of dreams in which she shoots her
racist boss. And these dreams she understood, not as predictions but as the dramatized
expression of her resentment.

Most dream experts nowadays think the main benefit we can gain from dreams is insight
into our true state of mind. So it's important to realize: the fact that African-Americans
use dreams as predictions doesn't mean they don't also use them as tools for gaining
psychological insight. The two ways of looking at dreams don't necessarily exclude one
another.

The following story, told by an interviewee, is a wonderful example of the wedding of
predictive and psychological interpretation of a single dream:

I had a friend who ended up having an affair with my husband. And we had our little
words, and I said, "I really want you to leave," and she did, she actually left
this city. Then there was a time when she returned or something. And I had a dream that I
went to this concert. I walk into the auditorium, and sitting in the audience is a friend
of mine whose name is Maya. Maya has on a royal blue hat with a feather. And I go join
her. And I say to her, "Oh, where did you get this hat?" You know, "It's
wonderful." And she tells me she bought it at this store, and it was on sale. I said,
"Cool." Then I look around and I see this person, this woman. And I just had
this sensation of anger, and I tell Maya, I say, "Excuse me." Anyway, I end
up...in the bathroom, and I say to her, I say, "You really just didn't believe me
when I told you that I would kill you, did you?" I said, "I'm just gonna have to
do it." And I grab her, and I stick her head in the toilet and just flush the toilet,
just flush the toilet, just flush her drowned. She disappears, she's gone.

Okay. Reality. I go to a concert, at a time my husband's performing.
In the same auditorium. Now, I'm very apprehensive because I'm told that this person is
back in town. So I look in the audience, and I don't see Maya in this damn hat, so I'm
like, "Whew! Great!" 'Cause the dream was so real, so vivid. So I go and I sit
down. I'll be darned! Maya comes and sits next to me, and she has on this damn blue hat!
And I am like, "Where'd you get that hat from?" She said the same thing she said
in the dream! Then, of course, I see this other woman. And I am trying to understand what
is going on. I'm talking about, as a conscious human being. So, what doesn't happen is, I
don't get that sensation that I had in the dream, I don't have any anger. And when I
actually face her, confront her later, all of that had dissipated and had basically
disappeared.

And I just explained to my mother, and my mother said, "Oh, you
just worked it out in your dream. You took care of the anger there."

There's an old prejudice of white psychiatry which says that African-Americans are not
"psychologically-minded." The reality is that African-Americans are especially
good at operating in more than a single interpretive mode toward dreams. I asked
psychoanalyst Barbara Pulliam if she had any problem getting black clients with an
extrapsychic orientation to look at dreams intrapsychically:

No, I haven't had a problem with it at all. They're very willing to associate to the
various elements in the dream. You just have to train them about day residue and teach
them what's expected, and they go right along with it. And that's notwithstanding I do
have some people who say that they will go to readers and all. And that's not pooh-poohed.

After talking about her visitation dreams, one woman added, "Sometimes something I
dreamed about will have some reference to what I'm doing today. Sometimes it plays out my
fears, or I work a lot of stuff out, in my sleep, that I maybe couldn't deal with."
To a list of dream functions such as prediction, Yoruba priestess Osuurete Adesanya added,
"On the other side, like all the Freudian thinkers think, it's some subconscious
either desires or fears coming out, or you're working out a fantasy that you couldn't do
while you were conscious." A dream of publisher Hermene Hartman's, about a new office
she was thinking of moving her newspaper to, was interpreted for her by friend and
employee Kai EL Zabar both as a premonition of a real threatfulfilled when their
present office was broken into a week laterand as a psychological indication:
"'You really don't like that [new] space.'" Finally, poet Angela Jackson had
this reaction to seeing Gayle Delaney on Oprah Winfrey:

[Oprah brought up] the old-way traditional African-American interpretations of dreams.
Oprah said she grew up being taught snakes meant a certain thing, you know, and all this.
Then the woman went on to say that only you can interpret your own dreams within, you
know, how they apply to your own consciousness, and your own life. And this made me kinda
angry, because I know what she said is true, but it'sit's narrow. It's not the whole
truth. Because I know people who have lived in the African-American cultural traditional
way of interpreting dreams, and they have proven accurate.

Later, Jackson said that dreams are "a divine source of information. It's God
talking to you," then added:

But you know what? That doesn't contradict the one about it coming from inside. Our
subconsciouses are attached to something greater.

The "subconscious". The word 'subconscious' came up spontaneously a number of
times in my interviews. The 'unconscious' was mentioned only by a couple of individuals
influenced by mainstream psychodynamic theories. Most (but not all) interviewees who used
the word subconscious appeared to think of it as a spiritual organ of the mind, as our
spiritual receiver: "Something larger than us...comes to us in our
subconsciousness," and "In my conscious subconscious mind, I am dealing with
information from the outside I'm just tapped into," and "My subconsciousness is
what is in touch with everything, these spirits and everything that's around me.... My
subconsciousness is my link to eternity," and "The subconscious is the spiritual
self."

Psychic versus Spiritual. As normally used, the term 'precognition', like 'telepathy'
and 'clairvoyance', is neutral as to the source or cause of the experience, except to
imply the existence of some additional, psychic faculty of the mind.

Administrator Darryl Burrows brought up a distinction which, he
said, African-Americans make between the psychic and the spiritual:

African-Americans, even the spiritual ones, tend to be very pejorative about psychics.
I mean, the whole Dionne Warwick, Letoya Jackson thing, no one takes it serious.

What about readers and such?

Oh, but that's not psychic! Readers are spiritual women of God. Psychics, that's the
title you use if you're not spiritual. If you claim to be able to see the future, but you
don't proclaim that your power comes from God. Now we will go and see Mother So-and-so,
the Seven Sisters and all this stuff, we'll go do that in a minute. But to justify it if
somebody challenges us, we say, "Well, I believe this woman is a woman of God, she
gets her power from God." But Dionne Warwick's psychic friends? Letoya? These are
people who have commercialized this and are trying to make money off it, they're not real.
They don't look anything like Mrs. Jones, that I know is a woman of God, that does have
visions.

My impression is that although the word itselfpsychichas actually entered
the African-American vocabulary through the mass media, the underlying distinction made by
Darryl Burrows is genuine. For example, after artist Marva Pitchford Jolly said, "I
can remember being extremely psychic as a little kid," she acknowledged that the word
was never used in her Mississippi childhood. She said she still is psychic, then added,
"It's become common in a funny kind of way." I asked what she meant:

Well, when I watch psychic programs on television, it's always comical. Something's
funny about it. It's almost like, well here comes Shirley McLaine with her extra power
rings around her head. It's not a comfort level. The old people would say
"funny," because "funny" and "fool" is kinda the same thing.
We are using things that we don't understand, and we don't understand how precious they
are. And maybe even sacred.

...if you have that faith, then you don't try to flash the flash cards and get into
what intellectual capacity of the mind would cause you to be able to predict. And I laugh
at those psychics, too, because dreams are not something to be toyed with lightly, or put
on the home shopping network.

By "flash the flash cards," Wideman was referring to Rhine's famous
experiment for testing psychic abilities in the laboratory. Thus he was rejecting
scientific investigation along with commercial exploitation, since neither, in his view,
is spiritually founded.

There were, however, some interviewees who resisted Darryl Burrows' observation. Writer
Gloria Naylor said "I go to psychics" and "I'm a bit psychic myself."
She denied that psychic and spiritual "are mutually exclusive. It just simply means
that for the black community, they have expanded the concept." Psychologist/filmmaker
Alice Stephens thinks that people who make the distinction "are just limited in their
understanding of the whole phenomenon. I am not averse to the idea that the psychic is
hooked up spiritually."

Furthermore, there certainly are African-Americans who accept the "Psychic
Friends" and other such popular manifestations. The two points of view came head to
head when a friend dropped in on hospital worker Diane Dugger during our interview. The
friend attacked television psychics while Dugger defended them. The friend held up the
example of her grandmother and the generations connected to slavery days:

(Friend:) Those people had true psychic powers. Dionne Warwick is an entertainer. Why
would she endorse something like that?

(Dugger:) Because she talked to one of her "psychic friends," which is the
lady that's in charge of the Psychic Friends Network, okay. And she was interpreting
Dionne Warwick's dreams, and that's the reason why she's promoting her friend's psychic
network, because the things that were interpreted to her, she felt was true.

(Friend:) People believe in that mess! And besides that, I say if she couldn't find her
way to San Jose, she certainly can't tell me about my future.

Despite such variations in viewpoint on the part of African-Americans, the picture
drawn by Darryl Burrows is general accurate. Not only is there widespread belief in
predictive dreams (and other "psychic" phenomena) among African-Americans, but
also, the experience is widely thought to have a spiritual foundation, and not simply to
display an additional faculty of the mind.